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Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

In his work Homo Juridicus, Alain Supiot considers the construction of legal personality by force and virtue of law as a precondition for human liberty. Michel Foucault views this same construction of legal personality – the construction of the subject through strategies of power, he calls it – as a ‘construction’ of liberty that is considerably less free than it is made out to be by the Enlightenment law reform projects proposed by Cesare Beccaria and other prominent eighteenth century law reformers. Foucault’s scepticism vis-á-vis Beccaria and others evidently also implies a critical stance vis-á-vis contemporary humanist understandings of law such as Supiot’s. This chapter will endeavour to explain what is at stake in the difference between these very different conceptions of legal personality by relating it to the problematics of subjectivity that came to the fore in the thinking of Hegel and the German Idealists.

The African-American philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois suggested in the mid-1940s that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. It seems that, at beginning of the 21st century, the problem of the color line has become even more exacerbated. A United Nations Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa in August and September of 2001 witnessed the most acrimonious of debates among delegates and the Israeli and American delegations abandoned the conference entirely. Further, the final declaration of the conference remains controversial in its demand to provide financial compensation for the human costs of slavery and colonialism. The UN conference, as well as the more dramatic spiral of violent events that have occurred since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York, seem to confirm that, in the 21st century, human foibles remain embedded in the unresolved religious and cultural conflicts of the global system.